Thursday, January 29, 2015

Thanks to the richest brothers on the planet we now know what the price tag on democracy is: $889 million. That’s what the Kochs are willing to spend to purchase the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The price seems a little low, considering the rich heritage of the merchandise…after all, we are talking about two and a half centuries of what Thomas Jefferson called a “great experiment…which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.” Seems Jefferson was wrong though; we will now be ruled by money. A bit tawdry to put a price tag on previously revered entities once occupied by incorruptible giants like Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Moynihan, Stevenson, Baker, and the like. The fact that the previous owner of the White House was a black man may have the dropped the price a bit.

Ted Cruz was on TV the other day decrying liberals who depict the Kochs as “the nexus of all evil.” Ted’s only half right. The Kochs need corrupt, maniacal, right-wing zealots like Cruz to complete the nexus. The list of Koch supplicants is a mile long; it includes nearly every conservative nut job one can imagine—Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Joni Ernst, Louis Gohmert—the crazier the better. Being a Koch-funded politician has become quite profitable. The median wealth of a typical congressman is now over $1 million. That’s nice for them, but bad for the rest of us who need government to work for all the people, not just Mr. Burns, Old Man Potter, and Ebenezer Scrooge.

You see, the Kochs are nuttier than pet squirrels, and their politics make Himmler seem like a moderate. Their forebears were notorious Nazis, and their father was the founder of the John Birch Society. Throw in millions from their wildly lucrative businesses, and you’ve got a fascist, imperious concoction cloaked in a lot of extremist “freedom of enterprise” rhetoric.

The Kochs’ megalomaniacal goal of transforming America from a democracy to oligarchy began in 1963 when Koch the father paid for and distributed “JFK: Wanted For Treason Posters” in Dallas in November 1963. (You see the super-rich were paying 78% income taxes under Kennedy, who also wanted to gut the power of Texas oil millionaires who paid no taxes.) A half century later the transformation is nearly complete. If the Kochs get enough of their pawns elected, we will see the end of health care access for the poor, the eradication of Social Security and Medicare, the end of public education, the perpetuation of a permanently crumbling infrastructure, and the disappearance of the middle class. The new socioeconomic strata will consist of two levels: the super-rich and the super-poor. The America of Koch will consist of yacht owners sailing past homeless vagrants sleeping on the beach; San Simeon-like castles towering above decaying slums; beggars herded into detention camps so as not to bother the 1% with their dreary needs. The Third Reich without the concern for its citizens.

Let’s officially dispense with the charade. We can drop the superfluous and misleading political titles, like Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader from Kentucky…or House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. From now on they should be addressed as Mitch McConnell, the distinguished leader of Koch Industries, and John Boehner, the Koch spokesperson in the House.

What can we do about all this? It’s simple: don’t ever vote for a Republican again as long as you live. And boycott all Koch industry products.

Friday, January 23, 2015

It’s hard to call America a democracy any longer. That’s because it is rapidly becoming a plutocracy, a place where a small handful of super-rich people control everything: tax rates, elections, laws, judges, business regulations (or lack thereof), climate, even life and death.

In 2014 the Washington Times reported that the wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80% own 7%. We now know those numbers are even worse. The richest 1% in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Think about that for a second. An extremely small minority of people own more, and have vastly more say in everything, than all the rest of us combined. It’s like the rich guy at the Super Bowl party of 100 people taking every slice of pizza and leaving just a small portion of one slice for the other 99 people. The gap between the top 10% and the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1000% for the top 1%. The average employee needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour. In Inequality for All—a 2013 documentary with Robert Reich in which he argued that income inequality is the defining issue for the United States—Reich states that 95% of economic gains went to the top 1% net worth since 2009 when the recovery allegedly started.

With their enormously excessive wealth, the super-rich are buying the government. A recent story in the Washington Post contained some stunning information:
• $486 million was spent by outside groups on Senate races in 2014
• More than $1 billion in super PAC has been spent since Citizens United
• Fewer than 200 people were responsible for more than $600 million of super PAC spending since 2010

And there is this from Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: Across all federal elections since Citizens United was decided in 2010, there has been more than $1 billion in super PAC spending, reports the Brennan Center. Just 195 individuals and their spouses gave almost 60 percent of that money -- more than $600 million. Forget about the top 1 percent. The top .01 percent of income earners are responsible for more than 40 percent of campaign contributions.

The rich are not just buying our government, though, they are also killing us…literally. How do inequality and health relate? Increasing evidence from scientists the world over indicates that many health outcomes — everything from life expectancy to infant mortality and obesity — can be linked to the level of economic inequality within a given population. Greater economic inequality appears to lead to worse health outcomes. By greater inequality, epidemiologists — the scientists who study the health of populations — don’t just mean poverty. Poor health and poverty do go hand-in-hand. How do inequality and health relate? Increasing evidence from scientists the world over indicates that many health outcomes — everything from life expectancy to infant mortality and obesity — can be linked to the level of economic inequality within a given population. Greater economic inequality appears to lead to worse health outcomes. By greater inequality, epidemiologists — the scientists who study the health of populations — don’t just mean poverty. Poor health and poverty do go hand-in-hand. But high levels of inequality, the epidemiological research shows, negatively affect the health of even the affluent, mainly because, researchers contend, inequality reduces social cohesion, which leads to more stress, fear, and insecurity for everyone. But high levels of inequality, the epidemiological research shows, negatively affect the health of even the affluent, mainly because, researchers contend, inequality reduces social cohesion, which leads to more stress, fear, and insecurity for everyone. Approximately one-third of annual deaths in the USA, epidemiological researchers say, are caused by the nation’s excessive inequality.

Further proof that income/wealth inequality has a direct relationship to health comes from analyzing Scandanavian countries where socialized medicine provides free health care to citizens. There the infant mortality rate is about 2%, three times lower than that in the United States.

I foresee a day when the richest .01% will consign the rest of us to decaying slums, devoid of edible food, drinkable water, decent health care, and scant legal or social recourse to do anything about it. This scenario is at the very heart of every Republican’s dream. In a ruthless, dog-eat-dog, Darwinian world (imagine the irony) it is the ultimate “American Dream” outcome. The GOP motto should be, “I have mine, and I want yours too. I want it all. That’s what America is all about.”

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Hollywood often gets history wrong and, thus, adds to the confusion and misperceptions of an American populace already ignorant of their own history. But Selma, thankfully, is an exception. The film about civil rights movement of the 1960s protrays Lyndon Johnson as a major impediment to African Americans obtaining equality prior to his ascension to the Presidency on November 22,1963.

In fact, it can be reasonably argued that Johnson, more than any other person in the country, was responsible for maintaining the Jim Crow system in the South prior to 1964. As Senate majority leader, Johnson was the most powerful Democrat in Washington in the 1950s, and he regularly stripped any and all civil rights bills of their “legal teeth” when they came up for votes in Congress.

Phillip Nelson, author of "LBJ: From Mastermind To Colossus," writes, “On at least twelve occasions during his time in Congress (1937-1960) he voted against acts that would have prohibited the use of literacy tests and poll taxes, the devices that had been designed for the very purpose of prohibiting blacks from voting. His history on this issue was such a sore subject by the time he became president that he took actions to hide it, by attempting to keep certain records of his public speeches ‘off the record.’”

Selma, though, stops short of accusing Johnson of being involved in the assassinations of the 1960s, but we now know that his suspicious behavior and nefarious connections surrounding the events of Dallas, Memphis and Los Angeles all but insure that he had prior knowledge of these political murders and worked hard to block any real investigations after the fact.

Any serious and honest examination of LBJ’s career reveals a long history of corruption, backstabbing, theft, and murder connected to his rise to power. In 1984 Billie Sol Estes, one of LBJ’s long-time bagman for payoffs and kickbacks, had his attorney file the letter below as a legal affidavit for prosecutors:

My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960's. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses:

I. Murders

1. The killing of Henry Marshall
2. The killing of George Krutilek
3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary
4. The killing of Harold Orr
5. The killing of Coleman Wade
6. The killing of Josefa Johnson
7. The killing of John Kinser
8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy.

Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders. In the cases of murders nos. 1-7, Mr. Estes' knowledge of the precise details concerning the way the murders were executed stems from conversations he had shortly after each event with Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace.

This letter is never mentioned by mainstream LBJ historians like Robert Caro, who incredibly turn a blind eye to the worst of LBJ’s misdeeds. They are aided, of course, by the establishment media who are deeply invested in the myth of LBJ and the lone gunman lie in the murder of JFK.

Back to Selma though…it is a worthy film that dares to tell the truth about an important time in American history. Nelson sums up its treatment of LBJ this way:

“Selma shows the LBJ persona and his complete history, as he and it was, at first as the leading impediment to civil rights reform, then, on becoming president, his 180 degree flip-flop to become its leading proponent. In 1964-65, the arcs of the two of them coincided, but after that their orbits shifted again, and took completely different directions by 1966-67. Johnson's dogged pursuit of a faraway, completely staged and unnecessary war, for which he exploited the patriotism of credulous young men -- a war fought essentially for his own personal, political and pecuniary gain, in his deluded mind -- caused a fundamental split between these men that festered until MLK's assassination on April 4, 1968. Nearly thirty years later The New York Times, on June 20, 1997, reported that Dexter Scott King, MLK's son speaking for the King family, announced their finding that LBJ and the FBI were behind the assassination, which was carried out by the military and intelligence apparatus of the United States government.”

Friday, January 16, 2015

Now that the holidays are over and I no longer have to quarrel with my crazy conservative relatives, I've had time to reflect on some of their outrageous, FOX-fed lies and wild misconceptions. Their most absurd claims were that America is going broke because of social welfare programs (though none of them want Social Security or Medicare cut). The fact is that relatively very little of the country's spending is allocated to food stamp recipients, unemployment compensation, and other Republican bugaboos. The majority of spending goes to sacred Republican corporate cash cows--defense contractors.

Figures for 2014 aren't available yet, but in 2013 alone nearly half of taxpayers' money, over $1 trillion, was spent on defense. Defense is a large umbrella under which falls categories like Operations and Maintenance, Procurement, Personnel Salaries and Housing, Construction, and Research, Testing and Evaluation. That last nebulous category is responsible for the biggest boondoggle is US history: the F35 fighter jet. The F-35 was designed to do everything except perform oral sex on its pilots; instead it has been a useless project that has wasted $1.5 trillion over many years of research and development. That's more than the entire defense budget of 2013. And yet, according to defense industry critic James Fallows, "...the aircraft can barely do anything: it has trouble flying at night, its engines have exploded during takeoff, and early models suffered structural cracks. There's no end in sight, either." This is great news for no one except Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the defective plane, which has profited immensely at taxpayers' expense.

But Lockheed is not the only corporate pig feeding at the public trough. The list of US defense contractors includes nearly every major corporation in America. The obvious culprits are Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Bechtel Corporation, Exxon, Shell Oil, General Dynamics, Remington Arms, Smith & Wesson, Springfield Armory, KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), Rockwell Collins, and General Electric. But also on the list are companies one might not suspect: IBM, Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Nextel, Ernst & Young, Motorola, Mitsubishi, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Humana, Israeli Aerospace, and the University of Texas are all receiving lucrative government handouts. The entire list of organizations receiving government money for defense projects runs into the thousands, and you can bet that each one of these entities is cajoling, financing, and schmoozing its favorite congressmen to ensure that the money keeps flowing. That's how our system works. Those who have money and power have a voice in government and how it spends our money. Those without a voice--the old, the poor, the weak--have very little say; thus, they are the ones whose funds are constantly imperiled. The right-wing, corporate propaganda machine called FOX News disseminates its lying filth long enough and loud enough to make even the most intelligent conservatives believe that social welfare programs are bankrupting the country. But you won't hear a peep out of them about defense contractor waste and corruption, like that surrounding the F-35.

Despite the fact that America is not at war anywhere in the world, defense spending continues to rise. That's because the system itself is too powerful to stop. Those who get rich from the defense cash grab have the wherewithal to spend freely on their preferred political candidates. Once in office these candidates continue to publicly rail against the poor, the frail, the defenseless, the "takers,"; all the while, behind the scenes, these politicians keep directing our dollars to their corporate benefactors. But there's more to this charade; the threat of war, terror, and impending doom must convince the citizens that defense spending is necessary. The tactic of scaring us into turning over our tax dollars to corporate greed is as old as US wars themselves. And we are alone in the world in wasting our treasure on worthless military spending.

The 2012 American defense budget was 6–7 times larger than the $106 billion military budget of China, the next closest military spender. The United States and its close allies are responsible for two-thirds to three-quarters of the world's military spending (of which, in turn, the U.S. is responsible for the majority). The US also maintains the largest number of military bases on foreign soil across the world. Why do we have bases and outsized military presences in far-flung places across the globe? If you don't know the answer to that, you haven't been paying attention.

So next holiday season, when your crazy conservative relatives try to convince you that social welfare is killing America, knock them over with the facts. The story of the F-35 alone will probably do the trick.

About Me

I am a freelance writer. My current novel, "The President's Mortician," is for sale on amazon.com, barnesand noble.com, and my publisher's website, Neverland Publishing. To read more about me and the book, visit neverlandpc.com and click on "Titles."